Answer Man grabs a shovel and keeps digging into the FBI tunnel mystery
|
Version 0 of 1. Over these last few Sundays, Answer Man has been strolling the grounds of the Mount Alto Veterans Hospital in Glover Park and crawling through the FBI tunnel under the Russian Embassy. Figuratively speaking, of course. The veterans hospital is long gone, demolished in 1967 to make way for the embassy. And no one from the FBI (or the embassy) has invited Answer Man to don a hard hat and go on a subterranean jaunt. [Scaling Glover Park’s Mount Alto: From VA hospital to Russian Embassy] But you can construct a landscape from memories, too, and many readers shared theirs. As a child in the late 1940s, Steve Strack lived on 39th Street NW. “A big treat was to walk to Pearson’s Drug Store at Wisconsin and Calvert to buy baseball cards,” Steve wrote. “On the way home we would sometimes walk down Tunlaw Road and pass the rear of Mount Alto. There would always be an older man sitting in a chair at the big doors that led into the boiler room. I think he was a stoker or fireman, in charge of keeping the fires going.” [Diplomatic impunity: Squashing the bugs infesting our embassy in Russia] Bethesda’s Bill Kelley lived in Georgetown in 1937 and 1938. “I had a paper route for the Washington Star, and the Vets Hospital was part of my route. Several veterans at the hospital had subscriptions for the Star and I delivered directly to them. At the time I was 14 and knew very little about the war, but very distinctly remember that many of the patients that I came into contact with at the hospital suffered from being exposed to mustard gas during combat in Europe.” The District’s George Pettie remembers peeking through the gate at the veterans hospital at Mount Alto as he delivered the Daily News every afternoon during the 1950s. “I remember Granddad talking about ‘Washington City’ and ‘Washington County,’ the once standard terms to distinguish the urban from the rural parts of the District of Columbia,” George wrote. Damian Wach grew up on Garfield Street NW from 1968 through the 1980s. His sister, Kathleen, still lives there. Before the embassy was built, Damian and his friends would play on the veterans hospital site, including at what they dubbed “Dead Man’s Falls,” a steep wooded hill at the end of a dead-end road. “One time we tried to dig a cave big enough to live in, by digging into the hill about halfway down,” Damian wrote. “We were very excited at first, but of course lost interest after a couple of hours of digging.” (The FBI didn’t lose interest in digging.) [What lies beneath? FBI tunnel in Glover Park heated up the Cold War.] “I also remember the apartment building next to Dead Man’s Falls,” Damian wrote. “That really was reserved for Russian families. It was fenced off and the kids inside all spoke Russian. We would look down on them from the top of the hill, and occasionally throw rocks at them. I once climbed down and spoke with some of them. They had school buses parked in their lot, and we had to jump down onto the roof of the buses. They were normal kids, but I felt sorry for them.” Paul F. Myers grew up not far from the hospital, across the street from the Pekin family. Thomas Pekin was a doctor at Mount Alto and later director of professional services there. Paul was friends with one of the doc’s sons, a boy nicknamed “Pug.” “Pug Pekin and I would roam through the hospital and sell newspapers to the veterans in the hospital,” Paul wrote. “I also seem to remember that there were tunnels connecting the various buildings that we used to roam through.” Tunnels! That got Answer Man’s attention. Robert Hyman is a photographer and explorer who has lived in Glover Park since 1999 and is fascinated by its espionage history. (“My house was a former CIA safe house,” he said.) “There’s an existing infrastructure below the ground for the old hospital,” Robert said. “All [the FBI] had to do is run wire through those tunnels and then run them underneath Tunlaw Road.” Robert said the building closest to the big marble Russian Embassy is a set of garden condominiums on Tunlaw. He visited them years ago. In the basement are typical storage units: wire cages to hold residents’ luggage or bicycles. “One of those units has got steel doors,” Robert said. “That’s the access [to the tunnel].” The mystery continues. Twitter: @johnkelly Send your questions about the Washington area to answerman@washpost.com. For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly. |